Prosecutor’s courtroom snark returns to haunt him

Share this:

When burglary defendant Raymond Higgins testified that he had been distraught at the time of the alleged crime because of the death of a close friend, prosecutor Christopher Lawson asked him whether it wasn’t “pretty pathetic if you’re using the memory of a dead 17-year-old kid as an excuse.”

After the judge ruled the question improper, Higgins said he’d also been feeling guilty about not attending the funeral of his sister, who had committed suicide. “You agree that’s pretty despicable if you were using that as an excuse,” Lawson told him.

According to a state appeals court in San Diego, the prosecutor also questioned the defense lawyer’s integrity, suggested the attorney had coached Higgins, and described a defense psychiatrist as a hired gun who had “attacked a victim in a rape trial.”

Lawson used his cross-examinations to make speeches and “engaged in a pattern of misconduct that rendered the trial fundamentally unfair,” the Fourth District Court of Appeal said in a ruling Thursday that overturned Higgins’ conviction and granted him a new trial. He has been serving a five-year prison sentence.

The ruling comes in the wake of a report in October by the Northern California Innocence Project at Santa Clara University asserting that prosecutors in the state are seldom punished for unethical courtroom conduct. The project said it found 707 cases from 1997 to 2009 in which courts had found misconduct by prosecutors, but only six prosecutors who were disciplined by the State Bar. The bar, in response, said it would take another look at some of those cases.

Lawson, a deputy district attorney in San Diego County, was unavailable for comment. Steve Walker, a spokesman for the office, said prosecutors were reviewing the ruling.

Higgins, a businessman and Naval Academy graduate with no previous criminal record, was charged with burglary and assault for breaking into a neighbor’s house in San Diego with two handguns in May 2008.

The neighbor had asked Higgins to keep an eye on her teenage son, who had gotten in trouble, and Higgins said he had gone to her home to talk to her after seeing the youth hanging out with the wrong crowd. Higgins said he had been drinking heavily, had no recollection of breaking into the home and hadn’t intended to hurt anyone with the gun he used to pry open a bedroom door.

When a defense psychiatrist testified that Higgins was suffering from alcoholism and depression, the prosecutor asked him about his previous testimony for a rape defendant — questioning that the appeals court called “irrelevant and potentially inflammatory.” Lawson later told the jury that the witness had been paid $7,000 to “come up with an excuse” for Higgins.

The prosecutor also said — without evidence, according to the court — that Higgins had been “coached … trained” by his lawyer to put on “an act” on the witness stand.

The prosecutor’s comments may have tipped the scales, the court said, noting that the jury at Higgins’ first trial deadlocked and he was convicted in a retrial. Defense lawyer Charles Sevilla said he expects to get Higgins released on bail while awaiting another trial.

The ruling should encourage district attorneys’ offices to “redouble their efforts at training,” Sevilla said. “Trying a case is not the place to explore the outer limits of advocacy.”